Hi folks. Sorry I haven't posted anything, needlessly scary. It's just been really hard stringing a coherent thought together, and some days go by so fast it feels like I woke up, blinked, and it got dark. Jay (as expected) has not been helping at all, not even paying any of the bills, and with no transportation and the divorce still dragging on I've got insurance issues that make treating this-- thus getting back to work-- impossible. I'm not even fussed about him not helping me-- I'm not even seeking anything in the divorce beyond getting away from him forever. My friends are helping me, Blunt has been amazing despite the situation at his end being tentative what with all the global economy screwage.

Right now, the goal is getting through October. If I can do that, then everything is fine. Legal proceedings should be done by then, I won't be living on a little bit of savings and I'll have the insurance situation settled.

I figure even if I did manage to get something up between now and October, it would be erratic as it has been this whole time, and I can't afford to wear out and get worse right now. When I can manage, I'll be working on Bleek's painting-- it would feel good to paint again-- and doing bits and pieces of comic work too.

I haven't been able to think straight enough to give Blunt a design concept for the new site, and I want to change everything... he's good at code but not really a concept guy :D Plus he's going to try to make it easier for us to maintain in case his job gets shipped elsewhere and he has to move, so we don't have to worry about it falling apart and not being able to reach him right away, so he wants to know what we need before starting the work.

So, right now, I am just going to try to make it through October. I don't want to use up all the remaining goodwill you folks have in futile checking on the site. Meet me here on All Saint's Day if you can, and I will have something-- I don't know how much, but something-- to show you.

Be well this summer, and remember to spend all the time you can with the people you care about the most.

See you in November.

We were hoping if we waited a few more days she'd be able to write the post herself, but it's not looking good right now. Aleph has taken a turn for the worse, and her hands have been numb off and on for more than a week now. We're used to these spells lasting a few days at a time, and, well, maybe this one is just stubborn. Could turn around any day.

When last I came by to install some equipment, she was in good spirits but not exactly the picture of health. Today isn't looking better. We're-- well, let's be honest, mostly Syl is-- taking care of her, but nobody's pressuring her to get back to work right now. Nobody around here much feels like putting the usual April Fool's gag together right now, and honestly it'd be a crime to follow this group's usual tradition with something slapped together on the fly. Just wouldn't feel right.

We'll get back to you when there's more to say.

Squee! Snow! I am most of the way through 33 and when I am not playing in the snow today, I am going to do my best to knock it out... the weather has been unbelievably good to me this last year. But, then again, I think I would be just as excited if it were blustery and difficult, too-- honestly, so long as it's not hot (my brain pressure thing gets a lot harder to deal with when it's hot) I enjoy the weather no matter what is happening. I've always had deep love for all the elements, but a special romance with the wind and sky.

I grew up on top of a volcano in the middle of the Pacific, so it's often weird for me living so removed from those raw elements. People who know me often say fire is my element, if a person can have an element-- and Lord knows I loved getting as close to the lava flows as I could, watching for the inevitable wildfires and always getting out untouched save the occasional melted shoes! Earthquakes were the highlight of my LIFE-- nothing quite moves me like having the earth jolt beneath my feet, and I miss them deeply even though they destroyed a lot before I quite wrapped my mind around storing my favourite things properly. Hurricanes, mountain winds, thunderstorms and torrential rains, those were always the most romantic things about where I lived. Cold was the best, though, only available in the most rarified places on the island, and it's so much better and more delicious when it comes in piles of snow.

The timing of this snow was eerie, just perfect last night; it helps that I don't pay attention to forecasts to it came as a total surprise. It made for a gorgeous morning. I'm so happy I'm bubbling about it just about everywhere there is to bubble. *squee!* Including a news page I will soon no longer have.

I love the wind, I love the cold, and I love the snow! Getting this much of it in March is like getting a hug from the winds, for me. If you're in the storm, I hope you curl up with a steamy cup of hot drink, an even steamier someone you love, and for the love of all that's holy stay off the roads!

Okay, so there's a new strip. Happy Heart Day!

If you haven't calibrated your monitor lately, you should. You're really missing out on a lot here if your monitor's got washed-out gamma and poor contrast. It drives me crazy that the images I create on the computer look so vastly different not just from screen to screen but from different angles in the very room I'm in. I usually optimize my screen for the richest, most vibrant colour I can get out of it, but I've put together a settings profile that matches the calibration on that link. So please, for the love of all that's holy, calibrate!.

Site got a bit wobbly, should be running fine now. Every once in a while a piece of mouthy old code from the previous webmasters leaps up and bites me in the hindparts. Seems to have gone down during a site backup.

Let me know if you have any troubles or find anything missing, you can PM me through the site or wait for me to wade through the email.

I am working again, and I feel bad for asking Blunt to make me a better interface for peek uploads because I am holding off the peeks for now. I will start them again when I am less prone to lockups but right now switching what I'm doing is locking me up hard so I am just going to concentrate on getting stuff done. Thanks for the patience.

Like I said, priorities are priorities, and even if I was somewhat useless sometimes I'm glad just my presence was able to help. Luckily, the person I was helping out needed someone with as little affect and as little reaction to her affect as possible, processing trauma can be rough when you feel jumpy and everybody reacts to that jumpiness. My inability to emote actually helped her emote without being hypersensitive to me. It's almost interesting enough to explore, but I just don't have the heart to anymore.

There are a few times I really resent having my neurology-- mostly when life is tumultuous and everything in me locks up like frozen gears. I stare and stare and once in a while I manage to think, I should be talking, I should be doing something, but then I'm just staring at the tiny flecks on the ceiling, I'm just watching things and it's about all I can do. I'm dimly aware of people talking to me and I do my best to respond as much as I can. That's happening a lot lately, and I just feel too tired to fight it the way I used to. The goal of being 'normal' haunted me in ways I never understood, because Jay was more subtle with the pressure and I never realized it until I stopped chasing my tail trying to make him happy. What I thought was just trying to meet him on a middle ground pretty well turns out to be, taken as a whole, his punishing me for not giving him the standard self-obsessed life he was really after. I just wish I hadn't used up much more than half my life trying to be a friend, then a wife to him. I wish he hadn't used me since we were kids-- his statement, not my supposition-- to pretend I could make him into something better than he was.

I'm not coping as much as I thought I was. I based way too much on believing I'd made progress with Jay, and finding out that once again I hadn't been able to tell at all when somebody was lying-- that practically everybody else around us could see it-- kinda brought everything down on my head. As much as people meant well in letting me know these things-- and it is a relief, it really is, to know that people saw what was going on, and to know why they became uncomfortable and drifted away-- they also let me know that everything I thought I knew about dealing with my disorder is pretty much useless. I'm going to take the articles down-- the positive stims article is already out there and helping people, and it's probably the only contribution I've managed that means anything. Anybody who wants to is free to take that, I don't even want credit, I just want it to be of some help.

I'm locking up at the slightest provocation right now and that's likely to continue until this 'pending' stage of things is over. A pen being out of place on my supplies rack can freeze me up to the point where I can't go past it to my desk, it's just being in a general state of overload. Stims are completely unhelpful because it's not sensory overload, it's more like my entire being is just holding its breath waiting for this weird period of change to be over.

Anyhow, Blunt is right. I make this too personal, and personal is not what I do best. So, this is among the last of these little ramblings you're going to see, I'm working with him trying to find a design I like to restructure the page. I don't think we're going to have a news page. I'll still jabber a little in artist's notes I think, but I am going to cut myself free of some of the past. It's going to make the page a lot quieter but it'll make me more productive too.

The less art you see, the more crap has been piling up behind the scenes. This comic has put me through hell behind the scenes because no matter how much I try to cope, I will never know how to draw boundaries, never really know how to understand what NTs are doing. There comes a point where trust spent frivolously becomes a debt, a debt paid by everything else in life. Everybody's got to learn to spend a little more wisely-- and for me that means to stop squandering trust like it's an infinite resource I'll never run out of. For someone with my trouble with development, the interest on trust is unbelievably high-- the penalties crippling.

I did best at this, and at this page, when I smirked to myself that nobody was out there, nobody was really paying attention to these little scribbles. That's likely to happen once the page goes quiet again. But I have been talked out of dumping the forums-- I may even chatter there more often once I take the news page down. I'll just no longer be focused on keeping people up to date on what's going on, apologizing for not being faster etc. It's boring, it's depressing, and it's unnecessary. The art will come when it comes and I'll do better at delivering it when I don't interrupt myself constantly to explain why it's not coming faster.

I feel sad about it, but relieved too-- kind of the same feeling as when I withdraw because I just can't process things anymore. Subtly over so long a time my husband tightened the screws to the point where any time I had to withdraw to stim, to just be me, I felt like I was abandoning everybody-- made me feel like my PDD was something I did deliberately to him-- and that crept into everything in my world. So I guess my last word to any autistics who read the page is this-- don't let that happen to you. Don't let anybody make you feel like you should apologize for whatever it is, whatever you have to do in order to keep functioning. Pulling back, pulling in is not something you're doing to them. You're not 'going away' from them. How you manage that, how you deal with it-- well I can't help you there, I thought I could but I was wrong. Just don't let yourself start believing it's an abandonment of others. You'll abandon everybody eventually if you start abandoning yourself.

Be well.

Just a quick note to say-- Blunt got the interface working and I'm good to go, but, I'm going to be AWOL helping a friend get through a rough time. Lord knows she's done the same for me in the past. I'm glad to be of help.

Just wanted to put a little thing here saying it's not our webmaster dragging his feet, and I'll be back when it's right for me to be :D

December was the roughest month health-wise that I've had in years-- I kept my eye on the happy things. I had a bunch of people over despite the obvious infection risk because things weren't looking so hot and I was kind of worried I wouldn't see them again if I missed the opportunity this year.

Plus, on a much happier note, I am starting over, starting a new life this year. It took forever but I got my identity back, my legal identity I mean. It actually would have been easier to steal my identity than it was to get it back, and even after fighting with Jay for months and bringing every threat I could think of to bear (which is corrosive to me and upsetting beyond my ability to describe, I don't like to threaten anybody) he /still/ stiffed me on one of the vital documents. It took some help and kindness from those in charge to get things done. Or maybe they just wanted me out of their office so they wouldn't catch my cough :P

Anyhow, it's January and things are more or less settled out, I'm back to work. I'm going to get rid of all the advertising except the banners I gave to permanent friends of the site. I don't feel any need to make this place profit now that Jay is gone, he's the one who was putting all the money pressure on me all the time. I'd much rather just do the work. I still don't think there's anything wrong with trying to turn a profit on art, but I am not nearly healthy enough or functional enough to make that happen.

I'm really thinking of taking Blunt up on his suggestions as far as depersonalizing the page. I love the community but it's understandably dwindled over time, and I can't blame them for that. I think the newsposts, the articles, and the community make me feel too exposed and don't really bring a lot of positives anymore. I'm not afraid of being exposed, just exhausted honestly-- just way too tired and drained to deal with it anymore. It's my own fault but I don't see a lot of solutions. I'm too involved, and for someone with a PDD that can be a real disadvantage. Plus, the community is a big hassle to the page and I feel stressed by the constant attacks by advertising bots.

I hate to do it though-- I'm giving it till April so I don't make any hasty decisions. I'll weigh the positives and negatives of the page as it is until then, and make the decision at that point.

OK, enough chatter. Back to work for me.

Syl's birthday went without the usual newspost this year, because for the first time we were really able to celebrate it to the hilt right here. A bunch of friends swung by from all over, and though we still don't have the room or furniture to let them stay WITH us, they were practically next door the whole week. It was a blast, truly, and though I was still kind of sick and couldn't do as much I had a lot of fun regardless. I've finally got a bunch of friends who understand that I have a really limited ability to interact sometimes, so rather than getting a lot of pressure I get interaction when I can handle it and room to "veg out" when I need to decompress. It's a huge contrast to the way I was brought up, that constant pressure to always try to be acceptable and "normal", which made receiving friends and family a nightmare.

It's very hard to get Syl to relax and enjoy attention, but she gets better at it every year. I think if I have one wish in this world it's that the scars from her past fade and let her stop feeling so guilty about being paid attention to and treated nicely. It's wretched that sometimes people treat each other as though it's some kind of burden or something undeserved, to treat each other with kindness and affection. She's never treated anybody that way, ever, and I hope sooner or later she realizes it's no burden on people who truly love her, to treat her like her feelings deserve attention too. It seems like such a simple and obvious principle, but I'm amazed at how many people overlook it. She's got her heart broken so much and so often by people she treats with kindness and respect who act like doing the same for her is simply beyond reason. These last few years she's stepped up to a better class of friends and together we're doing away with the myth that it's so much harder to treat her the way she has tried so hard to treat us over the time we've known her.

Well, the calendar's about to tick one over, and almost everybody's gone home-- we celebrate our new year in April but we observe the December one too. I got sick AGAIN from all the exposure to people, but it's all good, I'm well taken care of and I pretty much expected December to be a mess what with the whole brain-squish thing going on. :D

I know to a certain extent I am taking this all nonchalantly because it is likely the last time I'll have the freedom to spend so much time with my roommate. Done with school in a few months, done with the bar by midway through next year, and then working like crazygonuts to pay off her school loans-- well, for MY forseeable future the loads of fun-time ends right there :D So I'm sanguine about missing a lot of time, and I figure anybody who wants to pick up the story again later will hang in there until I can start it up again. I'm still working at it, still thinking about improving this or that detail, punching up this or that bit of script, but, I'm not really allowing myself to get driven again until the medical stuff is more sorted and Syl's time as a student is over. That may backfire on me if they decide I have to have the shunt put in and brain surgery doesn't work out so well, but, I think I would rather regret not getting a few more strips done than not spending more time with the people I love.

Thanks for reading, check back now and then and I'll keep this as updated as I can with what's going on here. Might even ramble on about a thing or two, when the time allows.

Heh, well. More consequences than I thought from impulse and reconnection with old friends. Still worth it, completely and totally.

I'm a little insomniac-- spending so much time resting for 3 weeks will do that to me. Plus, I had a restless night in general, which turned pleasant as I used it to reconnect a little with some of the non-nutty people in my life. Or pleasantly nutty, I should say. :D

I'm not quite cleared to stop resting yet, though I'm chomping at the bit here. As though to reinforce my doctor's orders, the bulb blew out on my main lamp this morning and now the lamp refuses to let go of the bulb. Poetic, but frustrating nonetheless. Have I mentioned just how much I love living with someone who keeps a spare lamp around? Who does that? Someone awesome, that's who.

But just in case of hilarious antics, I am going to leave the bulb-replacing to someone ELSE. Destroying one lamp is frustrating. Destroying two is just embarassing.

I'm not gonna try to paint a pretty face on it because I just end up feeling like a liar in the end-- at this point I have no clue what the (*&# is going on and when it will let up. I'm finally in the hands of professionals who don't make me feel like I have to be my own advocate, and right now it looks like a long slow process of finding out if they can drain my head without surgery or if they have to put a shunt in to get past the injury. So basically chaos as far as the eye can see.

But that's actually OK, because I've actually found a really nice existance in the midst of the chaos. Life has finally settled down a bit, the worst sources of stress in my life are either gone or on their way out, and what's left is a really stable situation that just keeps getting better. As I slowly get my visual processing back, I'm getting pretty obsessed with painting again, and I'm hoping I can get one of my bonier friends to help me figure out the pose I want out of the Makhvet painting I owe Bleek. Syl is incredibly bony but she's also double jointed, and joints under tension are important to me on that one. Planning that canvas is, like, the only work they'll let me do while resting-- I've had to scrap several tries at it but I know I'm getting closer because I can see things like glints and glazes forming in the back of my mind. When my subconscious starts picking tube colours to mix I know I'm almost ready to take another shot at the canvas.

I think the best thing about the whole sick time was hearing the phrase, "crazy chigoes". It is the very best term I have ever heard for the kind of people who see you exposed and vulnerable and then burrow in as far as they can so they gnaw on your insides until you realize they're irritating as hell. I had to look up chigoes, and then I couldn't decide which kind of chigoe I liked more for the turn of phrase. My oh-so-Merkan friend insisted since it was his phrase, I had to go with the North American harvest mite. But I'm still pouting. I may yet win.

So, I'm kicking back for a while, playing a few games, reconnecting a little, remembering how good it feels to laugh with people and cook with them and fill the house with warmth and home. The freezer is full of home-made tidbits, pierogi, dumplings, soft pretzels, and in the fridge there is hands-down the best chicken soup I have ever had, no broth, no shortcuts, just a whole chicken, a bunch of vegetables, and supernatural skill. It's right beside a sugar free apple pie I know we'll never be able to finish, much as the heart might want to. Stuff we made (well okay, I mostly watched for a lot of it, being infectious), split up, and saved some of for when we feel bad or alone while we're all scattered apart. It's sad that vacations don't last very long, and that life takes us all in such disparate directions. But all of us know that the only thing we're guaranteed is right here, right now, that any or all of us could be gone tomorrow. Sick as I am I fret more about a plane going down or a car going off the road. Nobody's ever guaranteed a next week, a next month, a next year. I'm gonna keep this November alive in my heart forever: this December makes the rest of this cruddy year seem worthwhile.

A is still super-sick so I am making her take some more time off, she really wanted to get back to work today but this tends to be the winter pattern: get sick, start working too early, relapse because of working too much, get super-sick again, start working too early, etc etc.

With the new medicine, it's a little harder -- having so many different kinds of pretty harsh medication in her system makes it more difficult to recover from the regular infections she gets every winter. Ironically, the medicine she's taking to lower the pressure in her head has blurred vision as a side effect -- the whole reason she started going to the neurologist in the first place was... drumroll... blurred vision. It's going to take a while to lessen the pressure in her head though, since it's been building from the car accident injury about 12 years ago.

Anyway, she always feels guilty taking any time off but I have the power of stealing all her equipment and stuff, so, I win. I can hold her pencils hostage! I can hold her stylus hostage too, since she's on the computer stage of the strip -- can't use a tablet without a stylus! Ha.

I'll let her get back to work when I feel like she's rested enough, but she's very bad at resting. I want things to be pretty low-key, especially with this new medicine she's on, since it is pretty nasty stuff. She has to stay out of the light... including artificial light! It makes her bleed, too, being an anti-coagulant, so, fun stuff all around. Things may be slow for the next few months because I don't want her straining herself while this stuff is supposed to work, and just sitting upright is a strain at this point. The pressure really got way too high to function at all and it's going to take some patience and time to slooooooowly lower it to a sane level.

Thanks for being patient, guys - I know you understand and that you all want her to get better too.

We had a late night and a really busy weekend so you probably won't see much progress there. Although it was a really tiring weekend it was really a lot of fun, even though I was recovering from a pretty rough time at the test. It's the first time the whole twitch & seize thing happened during an MRI and it was just really difficult to get any kind of picture at all. I couldn't even get one of the tests done because it was pointless with the movement, but, I'm not going to worry about it, I'm just going to wait and see what they say.

But, that was the last medical thing I had to do for the rest of the year, unless this chest cold turns into something nastier I am free and clear because we moved everything else to times when we won't get snowed in. We learned from last year :P I'm really looking forward to the rest, and hoping I make a lot of progress.

Still can't see real well but I'll do the best I can with what I've got. Thanks for reading, and I will start updating that peek once Syl has got the colour in-- as finals for her last year of law school approach it's a lower priority, but we've hit a good rythm with me working on the next strips while she does it, so it doesn't really slow us down. Today though, I am going to be lazy and drink lots of fluids and try to wish this cold away.

Well, I'm off to get my brain scanned tomorrow, but the next strip's lineart has already been processed and is awaiting main colour. I COULD put up a peek now but that wouldn't be fair as I am taking a well deserved rest to flush the contrast material out of my system. So, off I go to the giant magnets to get some detailed pictures of my brrraaaaaaiiinss (sorry, haven't had dinner yet) and then I intend to kick back a little.

Have a good weekend, folks, see you back here Monday.

So I got the flu-- It's no guess where-- and because of the medicine I'm on I'm extra susceptible to infection, so it was a really nasty week. No problem, though, I took the requisite couple days rest and got clearance today to get back to work.

All in all, still worth it though. He's one of the few real male friends I've ever had whose friendship survived an attempt at relationship, the only attempted suitor that didn't turn into a (*&#$ing fungus (there isn't an expletive blistering enough for how I feel about that) and try to take up residence wherever he could in my wounds when I got hurt by others. It's too bad he can't stick around or drop in more often, but that's one of the reasons we didn't work, his lifestyle and mine are incompatible and always have been.

So, although he gave me some kind of horrible international terminal airport flu, I still count the visit as a win, especially since Syl had her flu shot already so we didn't end up ping-ponging it between us.

All right then, back to work. I made some notes on the story time stuff too, I just need to polish up a bit of the premise and I'll start posting it to the members on Tuesdays. Also made some headway on the final third of the scripts, I've had them outlined but not fully drafted for years now and I really want to get them all down on paper in case my brain implodes or something :P Which, in this home, could actually happen.

My heart goes across the water to the travelling and the seeking-- hope you find what you're looking for, I really do. Next time bring presents, not a virus. :P

So yeah, another strip in the works, and I thought the subject line was a fun way to embrace the difficulty in a thematic way. In other words: Pbbbbhhhllllttt!!!

I've learned the hard way to keep my private life just that-- private-- but I can't help bubbling over just a little bit because last night I had what has got to be a contender for top five best kisses of my LIFETIME. To quote his little chuckle this afternoon, "Hell, it practically begs to be shouted from the rooftops. You share it any way you like. Especially with your roommate. Especially if I'm still hanging around." HA! I don't usually write in second person but he does sometimes, so I figured I'd do it that way for him :D I've long since given up on trying to figure out what I should be posting on this news page-- it's pretty much stream of consciousness these days :P

It was with a friend of ours, and hell no neither of us is interested in going down any other path than that. Anybody who would know who I'm talking about already knows anyhow, so I'll fill in a little vague contextual background. We've been there and it's amazing but it's just impossible for us in anything but a friend role and we came to that conclusion a loooong time ago. A kiss doesn't change that. Never has, never will.

But still.
Even when you've known someone practically forever you can still have those moments. Feeling as though the world has grown so still that if you move too quickly, or in the wrong direction, the whole thing could come shattering down around you. Everything outside this warm little space is too gray and sad to contemplate, but right here, within your little home, it has always been warm and full of love. Still, that love is hard to feel with your heart in pieces and old wounds aching. When he visits, he brings not only help packing up old things, he brings to that space a quiet undertone of support, of abiding strength, things that only he can bring. The quiet becomes music from the rumble of his voice, from the nearness of his breath, and everything else becomes very dim and faraway.

And then you're talking about something but what you're talking about has long since ceased to be important. And you're getting closer and closer but neither of you really knows what the other is thinking. And then he catches his breath a little, he dips his head to look at you through his bangs. "Is this really what you want?" he asks-- and for a disorienting moment you ponder a million things that question could mean. There are a billion things you don't want, a billion things you do. Which one, which one is in front of you right now?

You stammer an response that's half question, half answer, but he's not listening. Somewhere mid syllable your breath stopped being yours. His lips are pressed to yours, he lunges forward to close all remaining distance. Somewhere along the line you dropped what you were doing, forgot where you were, and wrapped your arms around him. It's a kiss that forces the worry from your mind. His arms give you just the kind of pressure you need to close old wounds, and in the moment he breathes for you, you feel almost as though a broken heart could beat again. His lips let you go, catch you up again, press you back, yield to you. A good kiss is never just one thing, never mechanical, never the same as any kiss you've had before, even from the same lips year after year.

Slowly, reluctantly, you let each other go. It has to stop in stages, lips brushing and parting again, letting go by degrees. A few more soft touches, some ragged breaths. You end up cheek to cheek. He asks if you feel better. You laugh together, you pull apart, and you want to whap him playfully with something but there's nothing at hand. Of course you feel better. Your cheeks are rosy, your eyes dark and glittering. The world has brightened, warmed, as though the whole room has been cheered by your laughter. Everything is better. Your head's still too swirly to remember that anything's ever been bad.

Then you're back to packing up the old junk, getting the past put where it belongs, out of sight and out of the way of the good times to come. You refuse to use any tape dispenser properly, and you snap the bubble wrap just to watch him wince. You stick out a tongue, and pop three more bubbles all at once. He raps you on the the top of the head and calls you a retard. He slides your ice water over and preaches hydration for the dozenth time today. Says you'll miss your kidneys when they're gone. You've got it on pretty good authority that your roommate would gleefully steal his for you, and when you inform him so, he grins. "Hot."

When it's getting late, you never want to look at another keepsake, another spoiled canvas. You never want to see another brown box again. There's still so much to do, but you'll be damned if you're doing it now. He settles back to watch you draw, and his are one of a few pairs of eyes you can actually stand to feel on you while you sketch out everything that's running around your mind. And every time you glance up at him, you can feel the glow, smell the stale tobacco in his cable-knit sweater. How does he transform that reek into a cheery smell? No matter. Every time he smiles, you remember how it feels when those lips slide into another shape. It is maddening. It is exhilarating. It is distracting.

But you've never been so focused in your life.

Peeks are going to be crazy slow for a bit because I decided I needed a few re-usable pieces of city skyline. The canal formerly known as Drainage Road-- where this takes place-- isn't as far from the city as I keep making it look. I admit don't want to draw buildings you can barely see over and over. Pretty sure you don't want me to either.

I've got about a week before the hospital stuff starts up again, but at least they're finally getting somewhere. The mystery isn't as mysterious anymore. My eyes are still pretty messed but I am grateful, because if they weren't it would be harder to get treated for the pressure in my head. Seems that an injury from the car accident in '96 created a partial blockage or something in the drainage system in my spine. The buildup of spinal fluid has been slowly crushing my brain to a pulp. The pressure was so bad, in fact, that the neurologist sent me in to check for eye swelling; she said she was certain the pressure test result had to be an error, but on the chance that it wasn't an error another test would be crazy dangerous. I'm obviously paraphrasing that, but, gist gotten I hope.

I think it's mostly the PDD getting to me, but the whole situation made me feel as though I had somehow cheated or failed at the pressure test. Doctors make me feel like I'm doing something wrong when I have anomalous results or didn't make enough of a fuss for them to realize I was really in trouble. A lot of the time when my test results are confusing I end up feeling as though they blame me for it. I think that's just a product of ABA flashbacks though-- anything that isn't within the slim margins of expected was met with swift, terrifying, degrading and nasty correction. The association became so strong that I don't even realize at first that nobody's angry with me. I know I just about flipped out when my eye doctor kept saying "Look straight at my eyes, don't look away", one of the problems that used to escalate into a full-on beating at home. Every time he said it I wanted to bolt out of the office, the more he told me to keep my eyes still the harder it got to keep any part of me still at all. Even when I was sitting in the waiting room and listening him to say it to others, to perfectly normal patients, it still put me right back in that awful waiting room wishing I could crawl inside the puzzles around me, and never come out.

The doctors I have now are very nice, but I still end up with this deep shame/unhappy/panic reaction when I hear things like the idea that I shouldn't be able to walk, talk, or move with that kind of injury-- it's so deeply ingrained, to feel like everything odd about me is something I'm doing to defy people, to be difficult. I end up apologizing profusely for things I can't even control, like how much I bleed or how fast a bone knits. Yeah. The wonders of ABA. Thanks for the 'help', Dr. S---. It damn near drove me away from medicine entirely.

I'm getting help though-- Syl being there helps a lot, because she provides body language for the NTs and unbeknownst to them she translates them for me in a lot of very subtle ways. I couldn't do any of these appointments without her, she's the reason I'm getting treatment at all.

Anyhow, the edema in my eyes confirms my brain being under pressure-- and better yet, my optic nerves seem to be a lot better than they should be. It's amazing what you can adapt to, I guess.

I felt so much better after the spinal tap, got so much work done in that brief respite from a headache that hasn't let up on me like that for 15 years, I figure I will let the rest of what's wrong wait until they fix that injury. Even with only 12 mg of fluid removed I am stimming less, concentrating here and there, and even having little bits of lost function re-emerge. Sadly the best of the relief didn't last very long, but it was the first substantial relief to come from ANY of this prodding and poking. I strongly suspect everything else will let up on me when my brain is not being crushed. So, while I'm going to be interrupted some more, at least now there's an end in sight.

I'll stick a peek up here in the morning when I get underway, knock wood. Members already know what happened, suffice it to say it was just a really exhausting and complicated thing.

Just as I was beginning to feel almost as though I were just not getting the big flashing message that I was not supposed to do this work-- I don't believe in a meddly God but I get a lot of pamphlets from people who do-- the headlights on our shared car went wonky, and all the appointments for the week had to be cancelled. Guilt-free relief from the meeting-and-coping with people grind, and time to work as well. Still don't believe in a meddly God, but relieved that if he is meddly, he at least has my back when I'm feeling low.

I'm going to make the most of whatever time there is before I have to go in for the next round of uncomfortable. Which pretty much means draw, colour, shade, as fast as I can before I lose the chance again.

I'd like to start talking more about things beyond entertainment and struggles around here-- it makes the whole project feel a bit myopic to just be chattering about our immediate concerns. The reasons I've sort of closed in like that are manifold, and hard to get into. One of the big challenges I've got to deal with is the understanding that people are really just beyond me. I have a few friends that I have known for years, and I'm lucky enough that they understand me and have made the effort to learn about who I am and how I operate. But the fact is, I'm learning more and more that people-- NT and atypical alike-- don't really want to put in that kind of effort over the long term. It makes me feel ever more blessed to have found an unique person like Syl.

That's part of why I've stopped writing about bridging the gap between NT and autistic, part of why I got frustrated and then just fell silent. Because it's just too much investment for most people, and that leaves me feeling very bitter about trying to help any autistic wander out on that limb. It's not that autistics don't lie, it's not in our nature and we suck at it but we're totally capable. It's that we can't detect lies, we're at a huge disadvantage and NTs refuse to see that. They act as though everybody manipulates, everybody knows what's going on in their minds and acts the same way. If one person in a situation is working hard to adapt and understand the other, while the other is playing along in some sort of game to get what they want, well, that's just setting the honest person up to be hurt. Ironically it's not the marriage that did this, but a couple of vultures who swooped in right after the marriage broke up to try to break off their own piece of me. I realized too late that no matter how much I cope, no matter how much I learn, I have to deal with the reality that my emotional responses will never grow up and I will never, never just spontaneously sprout the ability to see things coming.

So I don't think I'll write about ways to try to bridge that gap anymore. Maybe that gap keeps us lonely, looking at a situation that looks very happy on the surface, looks very nice and inviting. Maybe that gap keeps us safe from people who generally swarm all over each other using one another, lying to one another, and manipulating one another as if it were nothing.

Maybe I'm just too worn out and stretched too thin to take the same risks as before. Maybe I'm really starting to see that some of the things we think we'd be better off without actually do a lot to protect and serve us. It'll percolate around the back of my mind for a while, and then I'll want to write about it. The question I have to face is, will I? Is it brave, or just stupid, to make myself seem so accessible? Is it open and honest or just vulnerable, to spool my thoughts out knowing they can thread into places I can't imagine, cross the screens of people I would never want to be in the same room with, people I will never understand? That's going to take a lot more thought than just one late night by candlelight, eagerly eyeing my drafting board. That question might just take me a lifetime.

Well, most of the shows I like to watch have invented, or in some cases, evolved countless new ways to jump the shark. Seriously, I'm actually impressed by the degree to which they seem to have taken a chainsaw to the characters and stuck them in a great bloody blender. It's like a Dark Horse Daiquiri. It's been a really disappointing week both on the DVR and DVD, but I guess I'm grateful enough that I am seeing well enough to have my eyes offended by the insanely stupid turns many of the shows I liked are taking. It's sad when you begin watching a show deliberately suspending disbelief and treating it like empty fictional calories, lowering all your expectations and demanding nothing but entertainment-- and it still manages to disappoint you.

I can't wait for the off-season, for shows that have yet to receive the grubby melodramatic fingerprints of network executives. My imaginary Nathan couldn't be happier, of course, than getting to see new Bruce Campbell every week on Burn Notice, and so far psych is still holding strong. Hope that'll hold out for a while before someone decides, "A fan favourite must die" or "We should unkill some characters" or "A very special episode" is required. Eeee-yuck.

I'm keeping my thoughts on the lighter things right now, at least the thoughts that lead to typing. The rest are locked in a struggle with nature and genetics, and the less I think about that, the more I get done. My friends are awesome as always, and getting back in touch with some of the people who've been closest and most important to me has really left me feeling centered and satisfied despite all the crap I've been through over the last two years. I feel like I've struck a pretty good balance, and while there are still bits missing and a few broken jagged edges to life, well, I think it's like art really. Comes a point where trying to fix the imperfections destroys the whole thing completely. Trying to fill the empty spaces and mend the jagged bits has led me into nastier and nastier scrapes over the years, it's time to step back and let life set as is. It's a pretty beautiful picture, overall, and what I've got, well, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Strip is up. I am definitely taking Sunday off.

It's good to be back in a groove again. It's a weird and disjointed routine but I've finally got a routine laid down around here and it's working out for me so far. Enough blather, back to work-- next strip has twice as many frames and yet I got it blacklined in half the time, go figure.